The present invention relates printing stock for use in small-office, home-office (SOHO) or other printers. The present invention also relates to printing stock that includes adhesive, and to printing stock that is used to form signs or posters that, because of size, would not be able to be printed on a single sheet of printing stock.
Signs and posters are commonly utilized for any number of reasons, for example, for announcing a birthday, the arrival of a baby, an outdoor event at a park, a meeting, and so on. In many cases, the sign or poster is of a large size, that is, larger than a piece of paper having a standard size such as A4, 8½×11 inches, or legal size. Accordingly, a person desiring to make a large-scale sign has a couple of options. One option is to have the sign made professionally. However, this may involve a cost and a turn-around time that is not acceptable to a person.
Another option is to make the sign on a SOHO printer connected to a computer. To do so, a person needs to print out sections of the desired sign on a number of pieces of paper. Some SOHO printers cannot print over the entire extent of a sheet of paper (i.e., the edges of the paper are left blank), so a person may need to cut off the unprinted edges by hand and then assemble the remainder of the printed sheets together by abutting or overlapping them to form the sign. The assembled sheets then need to taped or otherwise adhered together. Available software can manipulate images so that partial images may be printed on a SOHO print, and then assembled by overlapping or abutting the individual sheets of stock.
One specific example of a conventional approach to printing large-scale signs on general-use printers is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,187,405 to Rudin. The Rudin patent shows two embodiments. One of the embodiments utilizes a sheet with a central image area defined by die cuts. The central image area is printed upon so the image edges align with the die cuts. The central image area is then removed from the sheet to form a sign.
In the other embodiment, a repositionable sheet has a strip of adhesive applied along a top edge and a bottom edge of the paper. The central image area is then printed upon and then removed from the sheet to form a sign. Without adhesive in a middle portion thereof, the central image area may be moved about when assembling a sign or a banner. However, in either embodiment of the Rudin patent, a user needs to position a plurality of sheets in such a way that adjacent edges of abutting sheets are precisely aligned in order to have whatever graphic or image is printed on the central image areas look presentable. Moreover, the Rudin patent discusses an extensive and time-consuming test-printing process whereby the user manually adjusts the print margins of the image so that the edges of the image precisely align with the die cuts around the central image area of the sheets.
While the above options may have cost advantages over professionally made signs, there are drawbacks. For example, a considerable amount of manual work needs to be employed to make the sign, particularly in ensuring that sheets are precisely printed and aligned, butting up against each other in a side-to-side arrangement. If there is any printer misregistration or skewing, then this cannot be compensated for, and the resulting images are likely to be misaligned when assembled. Moreover, if the printed image or graphic does not extend to the edges, then the user cannot align the sheets with the printed image but rather needs to “eyeball” or guess where to position adjacent sheets that form the sign.
In addition, the manual cutting of the unprinted edges may result in an imperfect sign with breaks or gaps in the text or image of the sign. Further along these lines, if the sheets are not square for any reason (e.g., slight distortion of the central print area during removal from the sheet, inaccurate die cutting, etc.), then at least one of the abutting edges will not line up perfectly, thereby leaving a visible gap between sheets. In addition, any shrinkage in the sheets caused by low humidity may cause gaps to form between adjacent sheets. The printing described in the Rudin patent has precise printer page alignment that may not be reliably repeated on each printed page. Finally, old tractor-feed printers could print large rectangular banners; however, the banners were generally of poor quality and limited in height by the standard size of paper utilized by tractor-feed printers.
Accordingly, there is a need for a printing stock and a related system that easily allow a user to print and assemble larger assemblies of the printing stock to form large signs, posters, banners, or the like. The present invention satisfies this need.